Boston's Berklee College of Music was already one of the premier conservatories for jazz when it launched a new program designed to push a select group of students beyond the classroom. The Berklee Global Jazz Institute assembles a small international ensemble to create works on the bandstand and explore connections to culture, nature and other art forms.

That band acts as a de facto emissary for Berklee and jazz across the U.S. and around the world. Appropriately, for its Newport-opening set, the group's current lineup was paired with the accomplished Puerto Rican tenor saxophonist David Sanchez, who led the ensemble in a performance of his own compositions.

August 6, 2014. Posted by WBGO.

The commanding singer Gregory Porter likes a good aqueous metaphor. He named his first album Water and led off with the title track. Then he called his latest album Liquid Spirit, which he released following last year's ecstatic Newport show. (He sang that title track, too, with its bouncy hand-clap exhortations.)

Porter returned to Newport this year on the festival's main stage, delivering a triumphant set that spanned his whole repertoire. And, appropriately enough, he cut through day-long rain showers during his performance on Saturday, August 2.

At the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, Duke Ellington and his Orchestra gave a performance so raucous and powerful that historians mark it as a turning point of the great bandleader's five-decade career. At its center was a piece called "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," with a barn-burning solo interlude from saxophonist Paul Gonsalves.

The composer and big-band leader Darcy James Argue is something of a Duke scholar, and by now a Newport Jazz Festival veteran. So he chose this date to present a 35-minute piece inspired by "Diminuendo" for the first time in the U.S. "Tensile Curves" joins a number of other previously unrecorded works that Secret Society presented at the main stage on Friday, Aug. 1.